A Big Refusal — So the Gold Sunk to the Bottom of the Sea

1895

A Case in Which a Good Bargain Might Have Been a Burden

James Clark, of Old Town, Wash., knows a good story in connection with the sinking of the steamship Pacific in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, in 1875, of which the only survivor was Neil Henley, now of Tacoma.

Mr. Henley floated around for hours on a raft after the Pacific was struck by the bark Orpheus. With him on the raft was a man named William Sampson, who became exhausted and sank, Mr. Clark says, with between $10,000 and $12,000 in a belt around his body. The fact that Sampson had the gold on his person was known to Mr. Clark and a few others only, and it has never been published.

Clark and Sampson were miners together on the Yukon river, in Alaska. The mining claim was a rich one, and was known in the Yukon district as the "Three-to-One." It was so called because the party that mined and owned it, was composed of three white men and a Chinese. They returned to Victoria to spend the first winter, after taking out about $5,000 apiece in gold, and the next spring when they went to back to open up the mine again, they found that the flood had swept away all their machinery and they would have to spend a considerable part of the season in making and putting in new machinery to handle the placer deposits. Sampson became discouraged and he sold his share in the diggings to his partners for about $5,000 and returned to Victoria. The "Three-to-One" made money that season the same as the season before.

Shortly after Sampson returned to Victoria he shipped on the steamer Pacific, intending to go to San Francisco He put the gold in a belt around his body, as was the custom in those days. The raft on which he and Henley floated was in reality a chicken coop. Sampson felt he could not last much longer in the heavy sea, which rolled the coop fearfully, and he begged Henley to take the gold. The latter, feeling that he would never set foot on shore again, refused to take the belt, and it went down with poor Sampson to the bottom of the sea. Henley was soon picked up. The next day, though, he regretted the loss of his companion on the chicken coop, he also deplored that he had not taken the proffered belt with its burden of gold.